151: The Most Important Thing

So many ideas and projects and things you could do. Some need to be done, some should be done, some would be nice to have done.

Even of the things that truly need to be done, there are simply so many that if an entire weekend opened up for you tomorrow, you’d still have more than you could possibly accomplish in that time.

I know because it’s what happens to me on my sabbatical. I take every 7th week off, like I’m doing right now. That’s where I have these mini sabbatical episodes. For an entire week, I’m free from my normal obligations.

There are so many things I can do during this time! It’s not just a weekend but an entire week! Surely I could get caught up on everything.

But it never happens.

Partly, that’s because I make a point to rest on my sabbatical. I purposefully don’t schedule the full thing out, but even if I did: it simply isn’t possible to do everything I need to get done.

So if there are more things that need to be done than you can possibly accomplish in your limited human abilities, what can you do?

Well, if you’re like me (and most other humans), you simply pretend that you’re not limited. You pretend that you have infinite time, energy, and resources. You attempt to do all of the things and run yourself into the ground.

“It has to be done. I simply must do all of the things,” you say.

If you work for yourself, you know that the work is never done. You know that there’s no such thing as “finishing the day’s work.” You could always do more. After all, you benefit from it, not some employer. You have to choose to clock out and every time you do, it’s done knowing there’s so much more that hasn’t been done.

That’s hard.

But as hard as it is, you have two choices: You can choose to pretend like you can accomplish everything and go full steam until you can’t go anymore.

Or…

You can choose accept your limitations. You can choose to acknowledge that you can’t physically do everything. It’s not possible for you to do everything and certainly not all at once. What this means is embracing the fact that you can only effectively do fewer things.

But let’s take it a step further. Yes, there are many things you can do, there are many things in your life and in your business that you really need to do, but here’s the question I want you to ask yourself:

What one thing will make the biggest difference in my life or business?

Yes, the house needs to be cleaned, yes, emails need your reply, yes, that hover effect would look cooler if you spent more time on your stylesheet, yes, your podcast would sound a little bit better with a $300 mic, yes, it would be really great to organize all of this junk into containers, yes, it would be great to learn something new if you watched just one more YouTube video…

But what one thing will have the biggest impact for you right now?

Do that one thing.

This probably goes without saying, but I feel it needs to be said: that means not doing all of the other things.

Want exponential growth? Learn the discipline of doing the single most important thing that will have a significant impact on your life or business.

The things you can do are infinite.
The things you should do are many.
The thing you must do is the one that makes the biggest difference.